


What is best loved

by redjacket



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 09:12:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12318048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redjacket/pseuds/redjacket
Summary: Everyone knew that you only truly saw colour when you met your soulmate. They went from muted –   like everything was behind a grey film – to bright and vibrant.That's the way his father had described it, anyway, when he talked about Steve’s mother.No one talked about how colours could dull too, that trauma could leach them out of a person until you were left with nothing but a dull, dingy grey.





	What is best loved

**Author's Note:**

> For the [Wondertrevnet drabble-a-thon](https://wondertrevnet.tumblr.com/). The prompt was A Place to Belong and my brain went a bit weird with it and made up a variation on the you see colours for the first time when you meet your soulmate thing. 
> 
> The guy who wrote the poem is John McCrae and the poem is In Flanders Fields. 

Everyone knew that you only truly saw colour when you met your soulmate. They went from muted – like everything was behind a grey film – to bright and vibrant.

That's the way his father had described it, anyway, when he talked about Steve’s mother.

No one talked about how colours could dull too, that trauma could leach them out of a person until you were left with nothing but a dull, dingy grey.

Steve wasn't that far gone yet but he was getting there. He had lost blue first. He knew it was only a cheap facsimile of what people with soulmates saw but he had wept bitterly the morning he woke up and the sky was a dead grey above him.

He didn't talk about it. Neither did any of the guys he served with. But you could tell when someone lost another colour. It seemed like the ones you valued most were the first to go – the blue sky, for him, then green, leaves and trees faded to the colour of bone, then yellow, sunshine and the his mother’s favourite flowers gone dreary and on and on and on.

Steve only had browns left. And reds. He had heard of a guy who lost everything but the colour of blood and poppies. Someone told him the man had written a poem about it, before he got sick and died. Steve hadn't had the heart to look it up.

He had served with a guy who had taken out his fiancé’s – his soulmate’s – photo one morning and realized it was all gone, the world was entirely grey, even her. He had shot himself before Steve and his CO could get him off the line.

Steve wondered, sometimes, what his mother had lost when his father died. He thought she hadn't lost it all but she had gone so sad after. If you lost what you loved most first...

Well. Steve felt sick every time he climbed into a plane and he had never seen true blue. He could see how losing that could break somebody.

Being chased by a whole ship of Germans out to kill him was a great motivator to keep going, though. Steve flew into the clouds on purpose – he figured if the Germans were suffering half as much as they were it would be that much harder to spot him.

He felt it when he broke the barrier but didn't have much time to consider what the hell had just happened because his plane was going down suddenly. He tried to put it down easy and was surprised – mostly. His plane stayed more-or-less together on the landing, only the clutch that bent enough to trap him inside as it started to fill with water and sink, taking him with it.

Steve fought because that's what he did, that's what his father had taught him while he was alive and his mother taught after he died. You fought to your last breath and then kept on fighting after that was gone.

He did wish, absently, that he could at least see the colour of the ocean he was drowning in.

There was a movement above him and a dark shape, a person? He could just make it out but everything was going a very different, final type of dark.

Except, then it wasn't. Steve coughed himself awake. He felt sick and wrung out but he was pretty sure he wasn't dead. Then, he opened his eyes.

It was like an explosion. He wasn't sure if he was reeling from nearly drowning or the colour...

Steve looked up at the woman above him. He was still pretty sure he wasn't dead but if anything could have made him doubt it, it was the beauty of her face – peach and rose and gold and dark, dark rich brown hair and eyes, almost black but even that wasn't the washed out blankness he had gotten used to – and behind her...just...

It was the bluest sky he had ever seen.

If he hadn't been so stunned and overwhelmed he thought he might have wept but all he could think was...

“Wow.”


End file.
